Enterprises and their customers interact with each other for a variety of purposes. For example, enterprises may engage with existing customers and potential customers to draw the customer's attention towards a product or a service, to provide information about an event of customer interest, to offer incentives and discounts, to solicit feedback, to provide billing related information, and the like. Similarly, the customers may initiate interactions with the enterprises to enquire about products/services of interest, to resolve concerns, to make payments, to lodge complaints, and the like.
Typically, a customer may wish to interact with an enterprise using a natural language form of communication. Communicating in such a manner enables the customer to express intent easily via voice, chat, email, etc. to obtain the desired outcomes. To support the customer's desire for natural language form of communication, many enterprises provide automated systems, such as for example automatic speech recognition (ASR) and interactive voice response (IVR) based interaction systems, chat assistants, and the like.
Typically, customers ask many types of questions such as for example, “What is my credit card balance?”, “Can I get a limit increase on my card?”, “How do I apply for a loan?”, “My card is lost! What do I do?”, and the like. To answer these and other sorts of questions, enterprises set up databases of questions and corresponding answers. The databases become large and complex as the range of products and services offered by the enterprises increases. The result is a commensurate increase in the range and number of possible questions and appropriate answers. To find an answer to a customer's question, an enterprise processes the question and then searches through the database for an appropriate answer. Depending on the question, there may be more than one appropriate answer to the question. For example, a customer may call in and ask, “What is my balance?” In an example scenario, the answer to such a simple question may be less obvious when the customer is calling a bank where the customer has multiple accounts. In some example scenarios, a customer may address the question to a wrong section of the enterprise. For example, a customer may call an enterprise to request a credit card limit increase but calls the lost or stolen card line instead. In such a scenario, a customer's interaction may be transferred and the customer may have to endure a long waiting period to initiate interaction with an agent. In some scenarios, the customer may not get the required assistance and exit the interaction with the enterprise. Such negative results are deleterious to enterprise objectives.
Therefore there is a need to determine what a customer query is efficiently and cost effectively, whether one or more answers to the query are available, and then offer an appropriate answer to the customer. When an appropriate answer is not available, it is desirable that contingency plans and processes are in place, which retain the customers long enough to answer their questions, but not so long that the enterprises incur excessive cost or lose other customers because of long wait times.